5 reasons why technosanct is a failure

I was blogging on and off on technology, web and internet marketing topics earlier, but that was on and off. I hoped to change all that when I registered for technsanct.com. But I did not quite succeed.

My metrics for success with technosanct are two-fold –

Reach more people with my sermons of essential blogging, making money and a few marketing tips

Make some money on the side

While I have been able to reach a few people, it is not really near to what I hoped to achieve.

I consider technosanct a failure for a few reasons.

Low traffic, it has stayed at 100+ a day.

Higher bounce rate than usual (stands at more than 80%)

Low reach

Zero money made

So, here’s the 3 why’s I ask myself.

Why? Why? Why?

I did some self-introspecting meditation today to find out just that. (well, I may be kidding. You will never know about my meditation secrets).

1. Lack of consistency

My goal was to publish 2 posts with 1000+ words every week. I have utterly failed.

I started too many blogs too soon, and that shrank the time available. Juggling a full-time job with weekend blogging is indeed exciting, but made it hard to stay consistent with updates to all the blogs.

That is just half the story. If I was passionate enough, I will make time. The blame here squarely lands on me.

You make it hard to follow a blog without consistency. You will kinda mitigate this once you have 200+ posts, since all newbies are busy reading up older material. But it is extremely important to make regular updates.

2. Lack of focus

I tend to get easily distracted with technology.

And, technology is a huge topic. Although I could find the relevant audience interested in technology, marketing and everything in between, it is a challenge as compared to just getting people interested in one of those topics.

I tried solve this by focusing on technology solutions related to blogging, website development and website maintenance. I deleted more posts than I can remember – but this has been a consistent issue. Choosing a topic that is narrower could have helped accelerate the “connect” with users. I could have pushed out the related topics for later when there was a substantial audience who cared.

3. Lack of innovation

I am a learner as well as a blogger. I do things myself, see what works, and blog about them.

But, in the interest of blogging, I also tend to take shortcuts, check out what others are doing, try them and blog about them.

This leads to some interesting results since though I am successful, it is not *my* idea.

In fact most of blogging, internet marketing posts out there are just a rehash of what others said with a twist. I did this with keyword research – I found looking for keywords in latest news articles, forums and popular blogs interesting as compared to researching on Keyword Planner alone.

But, this was not earth shattering. Most of the experienced bloggers may already be doing this subconsciously.

Another example is the niche research post. Although this post covers the most basic aspects to start out on niche research, it does not say something drastically new. Yes, the information certainly is collated in an interesting way (for me :), but the magic is missing.

But, these two posts do compare to interesting takes/writing as compared to other popular blogs. Again, that may be just me.

4. Minimal Outreach

This website is in a high competition domain – blogging, make money online, internet marketing and more such blah. These are topics that I am personally interested in and passionate about, but passion is not everything.

High competition = high no. of people with established authority writing about the same topics. This makes it incredibly difficult to rank on search engines.

So..

you can build, but they ain’t coming.

That is simply because no one knows you.

The right thing to do here is to reach out to people who are in the same niche. You establish relationships, encourage the experts and the followers to hop on and test waters on your blog.

Quality of blogs on the topics technosanct deals with is highly variable. So, you would think this will be an easy task to identify someone at the same level and just get things done.

As it stands –

this requires a lot of time and effort.

It also requires a compelling story for the other blogger to recommend your post or even to allow your link in comments.

Forums are hyper-sensitive to links and you will be expected to write mini blog posts before putting your link in.

And, this attitude does not help reaching out to influencers.

Consider the example of the niche research post. There are just too many forums and blog posts dealing with the topic.

I decided quite a while back that this and other posts are going to be time-consuming if I go all out with the connection thingy.

Although this helped speed up the process, I still had to spend time to monitor, comment and connect.

This, I didn’t (as Yoda would have said).

All this comes out to one thing –

5. Lack of passion

There are millions of blogs out there, but only a few stand out. Why?

Bloggers start with huge enthusiasm and it fizzles out a bit as the weeks and months progress.

I can lay blame on tens of things out there, but it boils down to two things – passion and commitment to the cause.

Though I would like to see myself as different, sadly the state of affairs here do not reflect that. Only with the drive to succeed can make one succeed.

I. will. change

All these were the thing of the past.

I took a silent oath this year to keep all my blogs updated at least once a week. While I succeeded in other blogs, technosanct was still the problem child.

My blog is young. There are lot of things to write about. I experiment on more than a few things in this space. So, there is no dearth of content. It is only I who can take it to the next level.

I also got inspired by Mahesh’s introspection. Though it is an older blog/post, Minterest.com made me think about how I structure my own site and what can I do about it.

I take this one step further.I am making a public commitment to write at least once a week here on. This does not mean I will sacrifice the quality (or whatever is left of it). It will be an exciting few weeks for me until the dust settles down and writing posts here becomes a routine activity.

I am making a public commitment to write at least once a week here on. This does not mean I will sacrifice the quality (or whatever is left of it). It will be an exciting few weeks for me until the dust settles down and writing posts here becomes a routine activity.

And, I will socialise this at all platforms under my disposal. Buzz Bundle is only 25% of the equation. I have been trying to improve my productivity on the internet, and technosanct is a good case study for what one can do by eliminating distractions.

I have the tools. I have the flair to write :). And, I have a renewed will.